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Save your running for other occasions. Like coming to church, perhaps? Hardly anyone runs to church - unless they are late, maybe. More likely if they are late, however, they just stay in bed. We don't run much anymore to or from anything and, unfortunately, it shows. I doubt that any you came running to church this morning. Or did you? Did any of you run toward Easter? According to John's Easter Gospel, there was a great deal of dashing about on the first Easter.
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First, according to John, Mary Magdalene came and she, seeing the stone rolled away and the tomb empty, started running - away, as it turned out, not so much because she had seen a mountain lion, but more to alert the others. In the predawn darkness, she runs to tell the rest of the disciples that Jesus" body is gone.
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Her shock and fear remind me of the time a friend ran from the classroom during a fire drill as a sophomore in high school. He were in a makeshift classroom because of an overcrowded building and the nearest outside door was down a narrow hallway and not always unlocked. The teacher, Mr. Cosgrove, had assigned him the duty of racing down the hall at the first sign of a warning siren to be sure the door was open so the class didn't get trapped in a narrow corridor. One day, by surprise, a fire drill siren sounded and with hardly a thought, he bolted from his chair slammed through the door and raced to the end of the hallway, as instructed. Everyone in the room was amazed and astounded at my friend's apparently panicked response to the siren. It was only when he returned to announce the preferred route was safe, that they remembered his assignment. He was pretty proud of himself. "How great that you could think so fast," Mr. Cosgrove said to him later. "We thought you were just scared out of your wits." "I wasn't thinking at all," he said. "I was just running out of fear that the fire would trap us all at the end of a blind hallway.
